The Day-Camp Boom

The beloved ritual of summer vacation is often said to have begun in agrarian communities, where parents needed their children’s help on the farm during the hot months. In actuality, much of the credit belongs to the nineteenth-century urban élite, who rallied to get their kids out of school so that they could all go on holiday together. Policymakers, intent on standardizing schooling across the country, gifted kids nationwide with summer vacation, and since then those long months of frog-catching and lemonade-sipping have been written into the lore of American childhood.

Where there exists an unoccupied American child, American businesses will rise up to provide an occupation. When it comes to summertime idleness, that occupation is day camp—think sleepaway camp minus the bed-wetting and nightmares. Over the past four years, the number of day camps in the U.S. has risen by forty per cent, according to the American Camp Association, an organization that runs an accreditation program for camps. In some cases, camp feels a little like school: a bus picks you up at eight o’clock in the morning and brings you home at four o’clock in the afternoon. In between, you might learn about robot-building, international languages, computers, or entrepreneurship, if you can afford one of the specialized camps that have become especially popular over the past five years, says Peg Smith, the C.E.O. of A.C.A.

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I recently visited the Dana Hall School, a girls’ academy in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where day camps have taken over the fifty-acre campus for the summer. I arrived to find a counsellor leading a group of kids from new, brick wellness center toward the campus pond. “Everywhere we go,” they chanted over and over, “people want to know. Who we are.” Josh Schiering, the camps’ executive director, was patrolling the grounds in a golf cart, communicating with a hundred and fifty staff members by way of walkie-talkies and an app his company designed to keep track of the kids. The camps started five summers ago, with thirty kids; this summer, he says, there are six hundred a week. They’re put on by LINX, a Wellesley company that also offers enrichment classes during the school year.

LINX offers more than thirty camps, focussed on topics like science, moviemaking, and theater. For about six hundred dollars a week, parents get weekly e-mails from their children’s counsellors and reports measuring their kids’ progress on a variety of metrics—from jump shots to progress at building a car to success at being a community member. Mr. Schiering says that a lot of cost of the programs goes into hiring instructors who are not just leaders in their fields but are proven at boosting kids’ morale. Brian Scalabrine, a former member of the Boston Celtics, is the head coach of the basketball program.

The students include kids like Matthew Han, an eight-year-old from the nearby suburb of Needham, who, on the day of my visit, was sitting in front of a computer working on the transitions in a film he’d helped make. Matthew—whose orange-soled sneakers matched his shirt—said he’s especially interested in the mechanics of movies and TV. In the film he was making, he played a teacher. (Matthew’s mom, Karen Han, later said the project had morphed into a comedy starring a character called General General.)

Matthew’s day at camp is shaped like a school day, with an opening ceremony in the morning followed by three periods of moviemaking then lunch, swimming, and a period of a classic day-camp sport, like Ultimate Frisbee. At the closing ceremony, the kids get ice pops. Matthew benefits from the practice of working in a group because he has Asperger’s syndrome, which affects his social functioning, says Ms. Han; plus, he hones his computer skills in the camp.

Matthew’s sisters, the ten-year-old Caroline and the five-year-old Martha, also attended LINX camps this summer; Caroline went to theatre camp that put on a production of “Footloose.” It all cost about three thousand dollars. Ms. Han describes Caroline as a top student. Matthew, meanwhile, is doing well in reading and math but struggles with writing; his mother uses the moviemaking camp to reward him for his hard work in summer school.

Ms. Han describes her family as upper-middle-class; she works part time as a biostatistics consultant, and her husband is an executive at a software company. Still, she must save money on things like clothes and cars to prioritize enrichment. “I want them to find their passion, and sometimes I think that maybe if I didn’t try something, that that would have been it,” she told me.

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Some families don’t have the choice; the explosion of summer offerings has not kept pace with American families’ abilities to afford them. Of some fifty-five million schoolchildren in the U.S., fourteen million are enrolled in a summer program. A survey by the After School Alliance, a group advocating for more programs for kids, indicated that some twenty-four million more would join a summer camp if one was affordable and accessible.

Vivian Perez and her three boys haven’t left their working-class town of Randolph, Massachusetts, much this summer. Ms. Perez’s husband, Jorge Ortiz, works two jobs, one restocking shelves at Target, another as a vault technician for an armored-truck company. His wages qualify the boys for discounted school lunches. The family gets by fine, but vacation and outings are too expensive, and the day camp that some of the boys’ classmates attend, at eighty-five dollars per child per week, is out of the family’s budget.

On a recent August day, the Ortiz boys played quietly in the town library, erecting a kitchen out of building blocks and befriending some other kids who wandered by. A trip to the local sprinkler park was derailed by rain, so they picked out books, mostly about superheroes and outer space. The kids, native Spanish speakers, need extra help in reading, so Ms. Perez coached them through worksheets sent home from school. She nudged Jeremy, one of her seven-year-old twins, through the words “ocean” and “mammal.”

Even if they could afford it, Ms. Perez isn’t sure day camp is necessary. She thinks that her help on reading will make more of a difference than any camp could; she also wonders if her kids would be properly supervised and if they’d get too hot being outside all the time. Another potential downside of all the choreographed fun of camp is that it ties kids up all day, leaving them with fewer opportunities to use their imagination.

Still, policymakers are realizing that summer vacation could be partly to blame for one of the biggest problems educators face: the learning gap between poorer kids and their wealthier peers. Low-income children lose two to three months’ worth of reading skills, on average, over the summer, while their higher-income peers hardly regress at all, according to research from the University of Missouri-Columbia. By the ninth grade, two-thirds of the gap in reading skills between high- and low-income students can be attributed to knowledge that has deteriorated over the summer, a Johns Hopkins study found. From there, it gets worse: kids fall behind in school, leading to higher dropout rates and fewer opportunities for decent wages. A 2009 McKinsey & Co. study concluded that the achievement gap between high- and low-income children in the U.S. had an effect on the economy similar to that of some recent recessions.

Most days, the Ortiz boys work on their reading in the morning, says Ms. Perez. They spend hours on the porch, playing with figurines. Twice, they went bowling; one day, they visited a children’s museum. When they complain of boredom, Ms. Perez says, “sometimes I feel badly because I feel like summer is not as much fun as it could be.”

Decent summer programs exist for lower-income kids, through Y.M.C.A.s, community centers, and scholarship programs. A program called the Summer Learning Project, for instance, gives free daily lessons and enrichment activities, including nature trips, to children from Boston public schools. LINX, for its part, offers scholarships to try to broaden its reach. Ms. Smith, of the camp association, says her twenty-seven-hundred-member camps give out two hundred and sixteen million dollars a year in such awards. Is it enough? “No,” she said. “Access is still an issue.”

Avery Johnson is a writer based in Boston. She is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and writes about health and families.